Chapter 1: Holding the Net
"Wren, Bravo Six. Talk to me."
"Six, Wren. I've lost Two-One. Last contact grid four-seven, east stairwell, before the floor went. Two-Two has eyes on the north wall, no movement. Gaz is holding the vehicles."
"Copy. Keep calling him."
"Two-One, Wren. Two-One, Wren, respond."
Static.
"Two-One, Wren. Simon. Simon, answer me."
Static.
That was eleven days ago. Eleven minutes of static, in a town in Urzikstan whose name you've decided not to say out loud anymore, before Ghost came back on the net, flat and calm, saying, "Wren, Two-One. Buried a bit. Fine. Tell Johnny to stop shouting." You hadn't known Soap was shouting. You'd had the volume all the way down on his channel because you'd needed to hear one voice, and it wasn't his.
You'd held. That's what the after-action report says, in Price's blunt, blocky handwriting. Wren held the net under fire after the forward TOC took indirect. Wren talked MacTavish out of a collapsed structure without visual. Wren maintained comms for four hours with a scalp laceration requiring nine stitches. Recommend commendation.
What the report doesn't say is that you haven't slept a full night since.
Hereford in November is a gray, wet, steady misery that you've always found comforting. The base sits low under the clouds like it's hiding from them. You've been with Task Force 141 for nearly two years, in the cramped comms room at the end of the admin block with its humming racks and its kettle that only works if you hold the switch down, and before that six years in the Royal Signals. You're good at this. You're the voice in their ears when they're somewhere they can't come back from. You've never once in your career frozen.
You didn't freeze in Urzikstan, either. That's the joke. You held. You were perfect. And now, eleven days later, you sit in the comms room at three in the morning with the lights off, listening to static on an empty channel, and your hands won't stop shaking.
"Thought I'd find you here."
You don't jump. You've heard him coming down the corridor; John Price walks like a man who doesn't care if you hear him. He leans in the doorway in a gray wool jumper with the sleeves shoved up, no boonie hat for once, his hair flattened on one side like he's been lying down and given up on it. He's holding two mugs.
"Sir."
"Don't sir me at three in the morning, love. It's undignified for both of us." He crosses the room and puts a mug down in front of you. Tea, strong enough to stand a spoon in, two sugars. You don't take sugar. You drink it anyway, because he's watching, and because it's hot, and because it's the first thing you've tasted in days.
He pulls up the other chair, turns it backwards and sits astride it with his arms folded across the backrest. He doesn't say anything. He just looks at the racks, and the dead monitors, and the headset lying on the desk where you've put it down for the night and picked it back up four times.
"Doc says you're not sleeping," he says eventually.
"Doc should mind his own business."
"Doc's business is literally you not sleeping." He sips his tea. "Gaz says you've been on the range every morning at half five."
"Gaz is a grass."
"Gaz is worried." He looks at you sideways. "We all are."
You stare at your tea. "I'm fine, Captain. Really. I just need a few more days."
"I've heard that before." He scratches his beard. "Said it myself, years back, after a bad job in the Caucasus. Told my CO I needed a few more days and then spent eighteen months drinking in a flat in Bethnal Green." He drains his mug and sets it on the desk. "You held, Wren. You held that net when nobody else could've. Johnny's alive because of you. Simon's alive because you kept calling. But holding's not free. It costs. And somebody's got to look after the one who held."
He stands up, puts a hand briefly on the top of your head, warm and heavy, the way you'd steady a nervous dog, and goes. You sit there afterwards in the dark with your face burning and your eyes stinging, not entirely sure why.
Soap comes the next evening.
He comes the next evening and the evening after that, and you start to suspect a rota. He turns up at your quarters at seven with a carrier bag from the Indian place on Widemarsh Street, balancing two cans of Irn-Bru on top, and says "Didnae know what you liked so I got one of everything," which turns out to be accurate. There's enough food for a section.
"Johnny," you say. "This is too much."
"Aye, well. I'm a growing lad." He pushes past you into your tiny room, kicks his boots off at the door like he lives there, and installs himself on your sofa with a garlic naan. His mohawk's grown out a bit since Urzikstan, soft at the edges. There's still a yellowing bruise along his jaw from where the stairwell came down on him. "Sit. Eat. Tell me what rubbish you're watching."
You sit. You eat. He's warm and loud and takes up your entire sofa, and he talks with his mouth full about Gaz's disastrous date with a girl from the Naafi, and somewhere around the second episode of a terrible baking programme you realize you've laughed four times.
He falls asleep before the third episode. He just tips sideways mid-sentence, head on your shoulder, out cold, the naan still in his hand. You sit very still. You look down at the bruise on his jaw.
You'd talked him out of that stairwell. Blind. Holding his position on a map in your head while he described what he could feel in the dark. Left hand, there's a gap. No, Johnny, your other left. Okay, I can see the north wall on Gaz's feed, if you go up and right you'll... and then a long horrible silence while he climbed, and then: Wren. I can see the sky.
You lean your cheek on top of his head. He smells like gunpowder and cardamom. He makes a small contented noise in his sleep and burrows closer, and you let him.
Ghost doesn't come to you at all. You go to him, in the end, at half five on a black wet morning on the range, because Gaz is a grass and Price knew exactly where you'd be.
He's already there. He's sitting on the bench behind the firing line, in his skull balaclava and a black hoodie, rifle across his knees, like he's been waiting. Maybe he has. You've never been sure Simon Riley sleeps at all.
You stop a few feet away. Your breath clouds in the cold.
"Lieutenant."
"Wren."
You want to say something. Eleven minutes of static. Simon, answer me. You'd said his name on an open net. You've never called him Simon in your life, not to his face, not once, and you'd shouted it into a radio with half of Bravo listening.
He doesn't mention it. He just shifts down the bench, a few inches, enough to make room. You sit. The bench is soaking wet. Neither of you says anything for a long time. The sky goes from black to charcoal to the sort of grubby gray that passes for dawn in Herefordshire.
"Heard you," he says.
You turn your head. He's looking out at the targets.
"Under the floor," he says. "Couldn't key the radio. Arm was pinned. But I could hear you. Calling. Kept me awake." A pause, long enough that you think that's the end of it. "Kept me here."
Your throat closes up entirely.
He turns his head. Through the eyeholes of the balaclava his eyes are dark brown, almost black, rimmed red from the cold or from not sleeping, and very steady on yours.
"You did good, Wren," he says.
Then he does something you will think about for weeks. He reaches over, slowly, and puts his gloved hand on the back of your neck. Under your hair. Just rests it there, heavy and warm through the leather, his thumb settling in the hollow behind your ear. Like he's checking you're real.
You stop breathing.
He holds it for maybe three seconds. Then he takes it away, picks up his rifle, stands and walks off toward the armory without another word, and you sit there on the wet bench with the ghost of his hand on your neck until your arse goes numb.
You figure it out on a Thursday.
You go up to Price's office at the end of the day to drop off the signals inventory, and the door's ajar. You lift your hand to knock and see them through the gap. Price behind his desk. Ghost standing beside it, mask rolled up to the bridge of his nose, and Price's hand wrapped around the back of his neck, exactly the way Ghost had held yours on the range. Soap is perched on the edge of the desk, grinning, saying something you can't hear. And Ghost bends his head, and Price kisses him. Not quick. Not secret. Easy and familiar and fond, like it's something they've done a thousand times.
You step back from the door so fast you nearly drop the inventory.
You stand in the corridor with your heart going. It all slots together like a jigsaw: the way they move around each other, the way Soap's always touching one or the other of them, the way Price says Simon and Johnny in a voice he doesn't use for anyone else. You feel stupid. You feel worse than stupid. You feel the tea and the curry and the hand on your neck curdle in your chest into something that looks a lot like pity.
They're together. Of course they're together. And they've been looking after you because you're a broken bit of kit they're responsible for.
You leave the inventory on the floor outside the door and walk away.
You don't get far. Footsteps behind you, unhurried. "Sergeant."
You stop. You don't turn round. "Sir."
"My office," says Price. "Now, please."
When you walk back in, the door shuts behind you. Soap is still perched on the desk. Ghost is leaning on the filing cabinet with his arms folded, mask back down. Price walks round and sits behind his desk, and laces his fingers on the blotter, and looks at you with steady blue eyes over his reading glasses.
"Sit down, love," he says. "We need to talk. We've been discussing you."
"Discussing me." Your voice comes out hoarse. "With who?"
Soap's grin goes soft and wicked at the edges. Ghost tilts his head.
"All of us," says Price.